Wednesday 16 October 2013 17.44 EDT
First published on Wednesday 16 October 2013 17.44 EDT

There are reasons to be cheerful after two days of talks in Geneva between Iran and the representatives of Britain, China, France, Russia, the US and Germany, the so-called P5+1. The first is that Iran, which made its latest offer on the nuclear issue in English, asked its western interlocutors to keep the details secret. This may be to stop flak from conservatives at home, or it could just be because confidential talks are more likely to succeed than grandstanding. The second sign of seriousness is that the Iranians went into some technical detail, unlike previous rounds in which vague (and easily deniable) language was used.

The gap between the two sides has also narrowed, although with a nuclear enrichment programme thus far advanced, the stakes are higher too. The west has dropped its demand that Iran should end all enrichment, and only insists on a ban on medium-enriched uranium, the threshold that could lead to weapons capability. And Iran has indicated it is once again prepared to sign an additional protocol which allows for unannounced intrusive inspection. There are caveats. The west insists that all the 20% enriched uranium is shipped out and reprocessed elsewhere. Deputy foreign minster Abbas Araqchi has vowed not to allow a gram of uranium to leave the country.

There is also a powerful undertow to Barack Obama's decision to respond to the newly elected Iranian president's charm offensive. It is present in the US Congress and has most forcefully been expressed by Binyamin Netanyahu. For the Israeli premier, stopping what he calls the Iranian bomb programme has for some time been more urgent than making peace with the Palestinians. The argument goes thus: with over 18,000 centrifuges made, but only a fraction of them running, Iran has the capacity to make the required amount of bomb-grade uranium within months. It is thus close to "break out" capacity and therefore it's essential to dismantle the whole infernal machine. On this logic, a bad agreement (which keeps this infrastructure in place) is worse than none at all.

First, it is not at all clear whether Iran is nearing the capacity to build a bomb. Second, an agreement would mean Iran would submit itself to unannounced inspections. The same logic that applies to Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons stocks applies even more to Iran's enrichment programme. If you really want to contain it, this is the route you go down. To achieve that, the west has to show flexibility as well. If the logjam is in Congress, the EU can make up the slack, particularly on banking restrictions. If Hassan Rouhani cannot bring home concrete benefits, there will be no agreement, and there might not be much of a future for him either. An imperfect agreement may indeed be better than none.